“Vile Plans to Cheat the Electoral College”

“Vile plans to cheat the Electoral College”—that’s the headline on a recent New York Postop-ed by my friend and occasional ideological sparring partner Seth Lipsky, founding editor of the late, lamented New York Sun (rose 2002, set 2008).

Seth’s opening paragraph takes note of a plan that is indeed vile. It’s the notorious scheme—advanced by Republican governors and legislative majorities in battleground states that lean Democratic in Presidential elections—to divide the electoral votes of those states by congressional district instead of awarding them all to the statewide winner.

Last year, for example, this plan would’ve handed Romney twelve of Pennsylvania’s twenty electors, even though three hundred thousand more Pennsylvanians voted for Obama (and a hundred and thirty thousand more voted for Democratic House candidates than for Republicans). It would have split Virginia’s electoral-vote tally 8-5 in Romney’s favor, despite Obama’s hundred-and-fifty-thousand-vote statewide majority. Implemented in all fifty states, it would have put Romney in the White House.

Seth, who is a fully paid-up conservative (he used to write editorials for the Wall Street Journal), doesn’t mention these details. Nor, needless to say, does his piece call the Republican plan “vile.” He merely writes, with what sounds very much like disapprobation: “No wonder Democrats, and many others, are upset.”

Funny, though, that there’s been hardly a peep from the Democrats about an even more radical scheme to change the way the president is elected—the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

The rest of the piece is a faintly disapproving, but reasonably fair, consideration of the N.P.V. plan, which, as hard-core readers of this blog are all too aware, is something of an obsession with me. As it happens, Seth and I have been down this road before. He shares my fascination with the plan, if not precisely my opinion of it, and I went into detail about most of his objections the last time we tussled over it, a couple of years ago. So I’ll keep my quibbles to a minimum this time, starting with this: Is the idea of electing our President the same way we elect governors, senators, mayors, and justices of the peace really so terribly radical?

So far, eight states—Maryland, Massachusetts, Washington, Vermont, Hawaii, New Jersey, Illinois, and California—plus the District of Columbia have approved the N.P.V. compact. “New York, notably, is halfway there, since the state Senate has ratified the measure,” Seth writes, adding:

At the moment, the only institution standing between this scheme and New York state is Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver—who doesn’t seem to be in any rush to embrace the idea.

It may be that Silver’s been persuaded by the pragmatic argument that the whole thing could blow up in his face: What if the scheme handed the White House to a Republican? It’s not hard to imagine some Democratic states trying to back out, with the whole thing winding up in the courts in an even uglier mess than 2000.

The New York Senate, which, by the way, is controlled by Republicans, passed the N.P.V. bill in 2011. The vote was 47 ayes to 13 nays, with Republicans favoring it by 21 to 11 and Democrats by 26 to 2. Seth is correct that Speaker Silver, a Democrat, is the big stumbling block in New York. Even though the bill is co-sponsored by an outright majority of his Assembly colleagues, he has never brought it to the floor for a vote.

His motives are a mystery, but I suspect they have more to do with the kind of petty, parochial jealousies and concerns that are not exactly uncommon in state legislatures than with anything so grand as a fear that the scheme might someday hand the White House to a Republican loser. The only circumstance in which New York’s adherence to N.P.V. could hand the White House to a Republican would be (a) if the Republican nominee earned the job by getting more Americans to vote for him than for the Democrat and (b) if the Democrat’s margin in New York was bigger than the Republican’s margin in the entire nation, including New York. I doubt that Silver’s motive is to preserve the remote possibility that New York might someday be in a position to thwart the will of the nation as a whole—that the Empire State might achieve the glory in which the Sunshine State basked in 2000.

Seth imagines that Democratic N.P.V. states might try to “back out” of the compact rather than let a Republican who had won a national majority take office. I doubt that, too. In any case, it would be illegal under the compact itself, which states (in Clause 2 of Article IV):

Any member state may withdraw from this agreement, except that a withdrawal occurring six months or less before the end of a President’s term shall not become effective until a President or Vice President shall have been qualified to serve the next term.

In other words, no do-overs. No wiggling out if you don’t like the outcome, or even if you decide at convention time that you probably won’t like the outcome.

I suppose I should “fully disclose” that Seth gives me a fraternal shout-out (“The compact’s most eloquent advocate here is The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg”), but even if he hadn’t done me that kindness, I would defend him from the Post’s suggestion that he thinks that N.P.V. is a vile cheat. He obviously doesn’t. The way I read his piece, he kind of likes N.P.V. He just kind of doesn’t like it slightly more. I suspect that, even more than Gerald Ford (FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD) and Mitt Romney (LET DETROIT GO BANKRUPT), he has been victimized by a mischievous or careless editor.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.